Pillar
History of the Lower Omo
You cannot understand the present of the Omo Valley without its histories — of movement, trade, incorporation into the Ethiopian state, and rapid change on the river.
A history of the Lower Omo
The deep and recent past of Ethiopia's far southwest — human origins, the meeting of three language families, incorporation into the Ethiopian state, and the rapid changes of the dam era.
Read →Dams, plantations and the changing river
The Gibe III dam and large-scale irrigated agriculture have altered the Omo's natural flood — the single most consequential change to life in the Lower Omo in living memory, and the one most often left out of travel writing.
Read →The Omo River and Lake Turkana
The river is the organising fact of the region — it feeds the world's largest desert lake, sets the farming calendar, marks boundaries between peoples, and is the reason the Lower Omo is habitable at all.
Read →Incorporation into the Ethiopian state
In the late nineteenth century the Ethiopian empire expanded south and the peoples of the Omo became subjects of a state centred far away. That incorporation — and the long argument about land, authority and autonomy that followed — shapes the region still.
Read →Conservation, national parks and land
Mago and Omo National Parks were drawn across land that people already lived on and grazed. The result is a long, unresolved tension between conservation, the state and the peoples whose territory the parks overlap.
Read →Archaeology and human origins in the Omo
The Lower Omo is one of the most significant places on earth for the study of human origins. The valley people live in today is among the oldest known homes of our species — a fact worth stating carefully, and without turning living communities into living fossils.
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